The Two-Way

7:18 am

Wed April 9, 2014

Book News: Archie Comics Is Going To Kill Off Archie

Say It Ain't So: Archie Andrews meets his maker in Archie Comics' upcoming issue of Life with Archie.

AP

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

Archie Andrews, the freckly, lovelorn comic book star since the 1940s, is going to die in an upcoming issue of the Life With Archie series, which shows Archie's life as an adult. "Archie dies as he lived — heroically," Archie Comics CEO Jon Goldwater told the New York Post. "He dies saving the life of a friend, and does it in his usual selfless way. Archie has always been a representation of us — the best of us. Our strengths and our faults." Writer Paul Kupperberg added, "This isn't a random one-off or 'what-if' story that we're doing as a gag. This is the story that we mapped out carefully and with much thought." But do not despair, dear readers: Archie will live on in his teenage incarnation. The Post says that "Archie — much to the relief of Jughead, Betty and Veronica — remains alive in comics set in the present." He'll even be given the Lena Dunham treatment (by which I mean she will write an Archie storyline, not that he will have a series of uncomfortable sexual experiences on camera.)

Artist Damien Hirst — he of the diamond-studded skull and the giant shark in a tank of formaldehyde — is coming out with an autobiography in 2015. It will be co-written with James Fox (who was Keith Richards' co-author on his memoir, Life) and published in the U.S. by Penguin Press. In a press release, Fox said of the book, "As well as the well-known arc of the boy from Leeds who took on the art establishment, it will include a barely known first act — a black and hilarious account of Hirst's youth, growing up in a semi-criminal, often violent milieu, while sharing with his friends an unlikely, but binding passion for art."

Gabriel Garcia Marquez has left the hospital where he was being treated for a lung infection, a Mexican medical official told The Associated Press. "His condition is delicate due to his age. He will recover at home," she added. Marquez's brother has said that the 87-year-old Nobel Prize winner, affectionately known as "Gabo," suffers from dementia.

For The New Yorker, Parul Sehgal praises the stories of Muriel Spark, with "their kinky nuns and schoolgirls; their meddlers and murderers; a grandmother who smuggles diamonds in loaves of bread; a young woman on holiday who meticulously plans her own murder, down to picking out the tie she intends to be strangled with."